Chinese gov has a new white paper out focused on Xinjiang population. Its central distortion is to say Uyghur pop. increased from 2010 to 2020 (it did), when the problem is that Uyghur births were brutally suppressed from 2017 onward. gov.cn/zhengce/2021-0… So they're hiding the crash in Uyghur population growth rates 2017-2020 by presenting all data in a block that includes a period of high Uyghur growth rates (2010-2016). They never say what happened between 2017 and 2020.

While the Chinese state has destroyed some of the most important Uyghur sacred and historical sites, they have supported the construction of invented sites, with exoticizing, primitivizing, fantasies of indigenous culture. Here is Xitiya "Mystery City" (photo from CITS site).🧵 Begun in 2011 and still expanding as of the last two years, Xitiya, near Karghalik, appropriates elements of Uyghur shrine architecture that are being destroyed at actual sacred places. For example, this "sacred tree" has Uyghur-style votive ribbons attached.

3+ years after my colleague Rahile Dawut's disappearance, some news about the official reasons for her detention. Police station at Xinjiang University says she was "provoking" farmers against the government. You can hear the phone recording from RFA here: rfa.org/uyghur/xewerle… Rahile did most of her fieldwork in rural locations. As a star scholar visiting from the top provincial university, she was in a position to tell local officials in remote areas that the religious traditions she was studying were innocuous and important to Uyghur inhabitants.

In "China's little Mecca," the town of Linxia, Gansu, every domed mosque has had its dome(s) removed.

All of these satellite images are from Linxia.

This is part of a government program that has hit cities across China. Many are replaced with gabled roofs that the government deems more "Chinese," in an official campaign to "Sinicize Islam," part of the current ethno-nationalist effort to assimilate minority cultures and religions.

Before and after pics of a Uyghur sacred historical site, Imam Asim, desecrated by China's authorities.

Thread on what it means for Uyghur culture to be destroyed, using photos of what has been lost in the banning of the shrine festival at Imam Asim. First a note on the photos: faces have been distorted and blurred. This is because authorities have put people in internment camps for religious activities they participated in as long as ten years ago.

By request, another numismatic thread. This time instead of coin-making habits transmitted across cultures separated by distance, an example of transmission across cultures in the same place (Yarkand, in today’s Xinjiang / Eastern Turkistan), separated by time. These three coins look quite different. First is a coin of the (Eastern Chaghatayid) Khanate of Yarkand under Abdullah Khan, 1635-1667. The second is a coin of the Dzungar Mongol, Tsewang Rabdan, 1697-1727, third is of the Manchu Qing empire under Qianlong, minted 1759-1761.

China’s propaganda push on its mass internment program for Uyghurs and other minorities has been remarkably successful. Thread 1/x Western media have been widely reproducing Chinese propaganda images from staged, dressed-up internment camps: ordinary classrooms, fence-free spaces, dancing inmates -- often without alternative images for context. But this is what internal Chinese propaganda portrayed before: